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The Handsome Family’s greatest gift lies in its tremendous talent for painting vivid, sometimes terrifying pictures with every word— NPR

The Handsome Family’s absorbing vision of decay and entropy is quietly unsettling and makes most other modern roots music seem like child’s play—MOTHER JONES

Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing… Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice — GREIL MARCUS

As songwriters it’s the eerie, ancestral voice of ‘Anonymous’ they ultimately resemble the most —CHICAGO READER

Through the Trees (1998)—10 essential Americana records of all time — MOJO

In the Air (2000) —One of the most important records of the 21st century — UNCUT

“Weightless Again”—100 best songs ever written about heartbreak— THE GUARDIAN, UK

RENNIE SPARKS DISAPPEARED one afternoon while waiting for a flight at O’Hare. A middle-aged businessman, McDonald’s bag in one hand, rolling-bag dragged by the other— walked up to Rennie and, without pause, turned and sat down on her lap. A second later his french fries and rolling bag were on the floor and he was sputtering apologies, insisting he’d seen an empty chair.

Rennie often has trouble with automatic faucets ignoring her waving hands but this unexpected airport invisibility was in 2014, the year the TV show True Detective used her song, “Far From Any Road” as its opening theme. This was the year The Handsome Family (aka husband and wife Brett and Rennie Sparks) became visible to millions. Even as she was getting sat on by strangers, youtube counts for The Handsome Family’s ‘hit’ song climbed from two million to ten million, twenty million and more. The song was in the top 10 in US and UK Spotify charts and spent months in itunes top 100 in countries as far-flung as Vietnam, South Africa, and the Ukraine.

Millions of viewers ‘broke the internet’ watching the final episode of True Detective S1, but Rennie and Brett watched in their little house in Albuquerque, NM feeling oddly alone. The Handsome Family were now known around the globe for a song they’d written 12 years earlier about fire ants and desert plants, a song now linked forever to a show about cops in a psychic swamp. The Sparks were arguably famous now, but at the same time unknown. They were not their famous song nor was their famous song written for the show that made it famous. All these disconnections, though, are fine when you’re a writer of songs.

For almost as long as they’ve been married (26 years) Brett and Rennie have written songs together (Brett, music; Rennie, words). Their finished work is never fully one or the other’s, but lives in unseen space between them. William Burroughs claimed he walked busy streets without being seen simply by seeing everyone else first. This is similar to the Sparks’ approach to songwriting and why Rennie embraces her power to vanish. You have to willingly disappear in order to write lyrics for someone else’s voice or to write music for someone else’s words. Invisible songwriters are happiest when their songs outshine them, leaving their creators unseen in the dust.

The Sparks have released 10 albums since 1995’s Odessa. Their songs have been covered by countless youtubers and well-known artists like Jeff Tweedy, Amanda Palmer, Christy Moore, Cerys Matthews and Andrew Bird (who released an entire record of HF covers). Guns ’N Roses used, “Far From Any Road” as stage entrance music for a South American tour and both Bruce Springsteen and Ringo Starr are fans. Decades into their careers, after winning the TV theme-show jackpot— the Sparks still find their greatest reward in disappearing into new songs.

And so in the strange light of 2014 they began again to write. 2016 brings the release of Unseen— 10 songs by a couple both world-famous and happily invisible. Each song on the record has a guiding color—gold, silver, green, red, white. Rennie is also a painter known for her vivid and surprising use of color and she finds herself painting even when her brushes are made of words. The stories of Unseen are mostly inspired by real events— “Gold” began when a bunch of twenty-dollar bills blew in Brett’s face in a parking-lot dust storm. “Gentlemen,” is a tribute to William Crookes who built the first vacuum tube in 1875 hoping to detect spirits from unseen dimensions. And “Tiny Tina”— Rennie still hasn’t seen that little horse.

Unseen is about the light that emanates from things we can’t see— behind “The Red Door,” in the empty hands of blackjack losers (“The Silver Light”), and amidst desert bones bleaching in the sun (“King of Dust”).

Since 2001 Brett has made their albums in a converted garage at the back of their house. He recorded Unseen on a Mac and played most of the parts at night with only hawk moths listening. There were guest musicians— David Gutierrez: mandolin on “Tiny Tina” and dobro on “The Silver Light.” Alex MacMahon: guitar on “The Silver Light,” baritone guitar and pedal steel on “Gold.” Jason Toth: drums throughout (except “Green Willow Valley”). Rennie wrote all the lyrics. She sang and played banjo and autoharp, but didn’t bother to write down on which songs.

The Sparks’ music is steeped in the western gothic of New Mexico life. The unseen is powerful here. Nothing rusts, but entire oceans have disappeared. Ski masks mean robberies, but in the slow dive of the sun enormous bugs awaken in thorny yards and unseen sirens and coyotes cry out to the purple sky. Just about anywhere you stand there’s been some blood drawn.

In 2016 The Handsome Family continue to sell out venues worldwide that they couldn’t have filled before TV fame. Live, Brett (guitar/vocals) and Rennie (banjo/bass/ vocals) are joined by drummer Jason Toth (worldwide) and multi-instrumentalist Alex MacMahon (USA). Their shows are full of humor and chit-chat. The Sparks aren’t afraid to reveal their ordinary humanness. The invisible couple is also very happy to be seen.

John Denver, Bread, The Carpenters, Gordon Lightfoot — “Those are artists I listen to, and I listen to it them because the melodies are fuckin’ strong as shit,” That’s the case singer-songwriter Chris Crofton makes for the influences he draws from on his shockingly earnest new album Hello, It’s Me.

The album showcases an honest, vulnerable Chris Crofton, a renaissance man who cut his teeth as a comedian, musician and actor in New York City, before making a name for himself in his adopted dual hometowns of Nashville and Los Angeles. He’s also a man full of aesthetic contrasts and contradictions, whose love for Reagan-era chart-topper Lionel Richie is rivaled by that of Washington D.C. DIY post-hardcore flagbearers Fugazi.

“I like really sentimental music — I’m really sentimental — and I also like stuff that makes you wanna overthrow the government,” he says.

There is a dedicated cult of fans who love Crofton for his work as an edgy stand-up comedian. Vulgar, acutely analytical, swaggering, and self-deprecating - as a comic Crofton takes on topics ranging from bad sex, political and cultural decline and gluten-fueled urban gentrification. His razor-sharp wit and trademark curmudgeonly delivery have seen him sharing stages with party rockers Deer Tick and fellow funnymen like Neil Hamburger, Scott Thompson and Bob Odenkirk. He's acted as well, onstage in NYC experimental theater ptoductions, and in TV and film roles for projects as diverse as CMT’s sitcom Still the King and director Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers. AND Crofton has a regular gig as the advice columnist for Music City alternative weekly publication the Nashville Scene.

Crofton’s former Nashville-based power-rock outfit the Alcohol Stuntband, which channeled not-so-easy-listening influences like AC/DC, The Jesus Lizard and Fugazi, was also complicated. Punked-out anthems that seemed to celebrate dysfunctional relationships, drug-fueled all-nighters and hard drinking are actually revved-up blues exercises, describing the terrible consequences of that lifestyle.”

Onstage, and eventually offstage as well, Crofton realized he was hiding behind a persona, saying he was doing his “best Bon Scott” as a way of masking who he really was — an insecure alcoholic from Connecticut. “I used to call myself the Alcohol Stuntman,” he recalls. “It’s plain as the nose on my face that I was in a character, and I was protecting myself from something."

“I used to think that I could change the world with dirty rock songs,” Crofton continues. “But I feel like, really, love songs, if they’re genuine, hold more importance...Those songs remind me that what is at the bottom of everything is love and sincere relationships.”

At this point there’s little that could come out of Crofton’s mouth that his followers might find shocking, save perhaps for an album stacked track to track with unapologetically romantic, gorgeously heartfelt, sweetly and vulnerably crooned, punchline-free ballads about heartbreak and how finding and losing love is what makes a man feel alive.

“This record is the outcome of getting sober for me, because it’s the first time I was able to make a clear-headed, predetermined piece of art,” Crofton says, explaining how, in 2014, he penned focused, tonally singular 10-song set capturing his headspace at a time when sobering up saved his life, while a pivotal relationship had dissolved in the process.

“Once I wasn’t drinking I was...back to my young self,” he recalls. “Toward the end of my drinking I realized I was gradually becoming a stereotype - and possibly a statistic…I was falling apart. I had gotten really lost. And then I had this wonderful relationship that didn’t work out, but during that relationship I quit drinking, and then when the relationship ended I was able to write the first adult songs I ever wrote. These are those songs.”

Of those songs, Crofton’s most proud of the twinkling, string-section-boasting “It’s all My Fault,” a reflective, ending-credits-to-sad-love-story confessional the singer says is the a better song than he’d ever thought he could write. “It’s the prettiest song I ever wrote. That’s what I felt I’d been working up to for 15 years.” It’s also worth noting that Crofton wrote the opening line, “Hello, It’s Me,” to the album’s title track a few years before pop superstar Adele did. “She got it out first because she probably had her life together better [than I did],” Crofton jokes.

Crofton cut the album in an inspired two-day session at Louisville’s La La Land Recording Studio with producer Kevin Ratterman. He was backed by a trio of Nashville cats: drummer Matt Hearn (Bully), bassist (and brother-in-law) Dave Dawson and keyboardist James “Matt” Rowland (Jamie Lidell.) The recordings were rounded out by guest vocalist Katie Toupin (Houndmouth) and lead guitar from My Morning Jacket’s Jim James and Houndmouth’s Matt Myers. They had to work fast, as Crofton was plotting a move from Nashville to L.A. at the time. Ratterman, best known for his work with the likes of My Morning Jacket, Ray LaMontagne, White Reaper and many others, had previously produced two Alcohol Stuntband records, so he certainly didn’t expect a sober Crofton to show up on his studio doorstep with an acoustic guitar and a set of stunning soft rock songs.

But the producer was happy to oblige Crofton in making Hello ‘s should-be-hits. The wistful, depressively whimsical “UFO Hunters,” the barroom-ready waltz “Find Me in the Bar,” and the lonely country weeper “Numbers Game” glimmer with an open, Laurel Canyon-ready resplendence that makes them sound at home alongside the ’70s, AM-radio-gold, countrypolitan story songs of Neil Diamond and John Denver - staples that the singer fondly remembers listening to on car rides with mom as a kid. “That music is burned on my brain,” he says. “It still takes me to a very wide-eyed place.”

“I’m a romantic person,” Crofton goes on, noting how, even at his most debauched, his true sentimental side was only barely buried beneath the surface. “I sat in the same smoky bar with a whiskey and a pint in front of me, listening to Rod Stewart’s version of ‘First Cut Is the Deepest’ on the jukebox for, like, eight years straight in the 1990s thinking I was the star of the world’s saddest movie - and I loved it. I romanticize everything. At its worst, this leads to acting like Charles Bukowski, and I think at its best it means trying to communicate love in a way that you think maybe will reach people.”

PLEASE NOTE: Tickets are not always available at Depth of Field, Electric Fetus & The Cedar.

In person: Tickets can be purchased at The Cedar when we are open for shows. Check our calendar for show dates and door times (no fee; cash, check, credit card). Our other ticket outlets are Depth of Field (no fee; cash or check only), and Electric Fetus (approximately $2 fee).

Online: (On Ticketfly, typically $2–$3 fee/ticket + $1 restoration fee) until 2 hours before door time on day of show

The Cedar is an all ages venue

Discounts: Students with ID, seniors over 65, and children under 12 may purchase tickets at a discount at the door (subject to ticket availability).

Access: The Cedar strives to make our facilities and programming available to as many community members as possible and will accommodate special requests to the best of our ability. To request special accommodations or seating at an upcoming Cedar show, please contact our box office at 612-338-2674 or info@thecedar.org.